Queen victoria

The wife of the Victorian photography pioneer Henry Fox Talbot called his first cameras ‘mousetraps’: little wooden boxes that were designed to capture anything placed before them. Yet most of Fox Talbot’s earliest photographs do not show living bodies at all. Long exposure times meant that the faintest twitch on a sitter’s face would dissolve it into a foggy blur, so instead he trained his lens on objects like shells and books, creating whole new collections he could reproduce in ghostly black and white. Preserving the images of dead children in an album, like dried flowers, meant that they could remain little forever Within a few years numerous other photography

Has a book ever been more bizarrely mis-titled than this one? The First Cold War: Anglo-Russian Relations in the 19th Century has nothing whatever to do with the actual Cold War, nor is it for the most part concerned with the 19th century. Rather, Barbara Emerson has written a thorough and often diverting diplomatic history of Anglo-Russian relations from the 16th to the early 20th century. This period encompasses at least 14 wars in which British and Russian troops found themselves embroiled, sometimes on the same side, sometimes on opposite sides. None of these wars was remotely ‘cold’. Nor does Emerson attempt to make any argument that the shifting great

All sorts of animals have been kept as pets over the centuries. We know of sparrows in Catullus and John Skelton. There is a badger with a collar in a fresco by Signorelli – probably not much more biddable than the lobster Gerard de Nerval supposedly took for walks in Paris. The word ‘puss’ seems not to have referred to cats before the late 19th century but to hares, either a pet one (William Cowper had three, of whom Puss was sweet-natured and Tiney ‘the surliest of his kind’), or one being hunted in Surtees. Dogs always occupied a special place, with names and a position in the household. Cats

Alwyn Turner writes early on that Little Englanders is ‘an attempt to take the temperature of the nation as it emerged from a century that had dominated the world and was beginning – whether it knew it or not – a long process of decline’. Perhaps for that reason, or perhaps because the high (and low) politics of the years from 1901 to 1914 – the Edwardian era continues for four years after the death of the eponymous sovereign, up to the lights going out all over Europe in August 1914 – have been so exhaustively covered in recent years, he tells his readers that he will draw heavily on

In Traitor King, Andrew Lownie shows how the Duke of Windsor — the former Edward VIII, who abdicated in 1936 — gave aid and comfort to his country’s enemies before and during the second world war. Reading this meticulously researched book, it seems extraordinary that he remained at liberty. A less deferential society would have interned him in 1940 along with the followers of his friend Oswald Mosley, most of whom were far less dangerous. He could even have been tried for treason after the war. To Lownie, the duke was an aberration, a one-off. But in Tea with Hitler, Dean Palmer shows us a family into which he fitted

In 2015 a pair of linen drawers belonging to Queen Victoria sold at auction for over £12,000. In old age Queen Victoria swathed herself in wraps and loose gowns which artfully concealed her figure, and her official photographers were ordered to photoshop her outline. But these knickers with their 45” waistband make plain that the 5’-queen was borderline obese. Annie Gray has written a culinary biography of Queen Victoria which tells us what she ate. Breakfast was a hearty meal, often featuring lamb chops. For dinner Victoria ate rich French food, and her menus were always written in French. No plain Mrs Beeton-style cooking for the queen. Dinner began with